The Abandoned Entertainment
by StarXEnoch
Summary: An obsessed fan takes an ill-fated trip to New Mexico to dig up the animatronic characters of a long lost kid's restaurant. Little does he know that some secrets are meant to stay buried...and some conspiracies are meant to be lost. Featuring loads politically incorrect humor and several plot twists and you will remember for the rest of your life.
1. The Set-Up

Author's Note: So this story is partially based upon the game, but also upon the real history of Chuck E Cheese's. Most of it is my own imagination though. Enjoy!

Chapter One: The Set-Up

Like all kids growing up in the early 2000's, my favorite place to eat was Happy Rat's Pizza Place. It was a one-of-the-kind restaurant, where a kid could be a kid. Sure, the overpriced pizza was crap, and the indoor playground had not been washed in years, but I didn't care. My parents took me there each year for my birthday as a reward for making all A's in school. I loved everything about it. The rides. The flickering arcade games. The undercooked food. The mediocre table service. The sweaty costumed characters.

But most of all, I loved the animatronic robot band that played songs on the main stage. Leading the band was Happy Rat himself. He was a jovial sort of fellow with buck teeth, bloodshot eyes, a skin-tight tuxedo, and cigar dangling from his lips. He always looked happy to see me. Backing him up on the one-string guitar was his on-and-off lover, Yellow Duck. She was basically a giant duck with a red ponytail and female anatomy. She was my dad's favorite. Beside her was Shylock, a lovable hook-nosed criminal who banged the drums when he was not trying to steal Happy Rat's Secret Pizza Formula. The last character was Purple Blob. It had no gender, and was an unofficial mascot of the transgendered community. It kept everyone on beat with the cymbals.

I would stare for hours at the robot band as it played child friendly remixes of Linkin Park and ACDC songs. I sometimes asked the waiters how the characters could both be playing on stage and greeting the children at the front door, but I never got a straight answer. I never needed one. The place was pure magic for me.

As I grew older I came to see the flaws of the robot band. The robots were not built perfectly. They creaked with age. Their mouths were not synced up perfectly with the lyrics. They were coated with rust. I still loved it, don't get me wrong, but I could see it for what it was. I was still a frequent customer in my teenage years.

My early twenties was when everything changed. I began to delve in the secret history behind the restaurant. Apparently in the 90's, Happy Rat's Pizza Place was rivaled by a similar restaurant, Happy Time Pizzeria. The story of the battle between these two restaurants is filled with wins, losses, and betrayals. In all honesty, I've never been able to learn much about it. All public records I look through were surprisingly silent on the matter.

But this I do know: On April 1, 2001, Happy Time Pizzeria was forced to close down. What it's characters looked like, and the size and shape of its robot band—I cannot say. All of the animatronics were disposed of overnight. Like all dark secrets, they were hidden where no one was expected to go.

According to one uncited Wikipedia article, all Happy Time Robots were buried in the New Mexico Desert. Where in New Mexico, and how many of them? These questions have haunted me for years!

That is, until I graduated from college, and had an entire semester to kill before entering seminary. I had assembled my team. I had rented my minivan. I was going to New Mexico, come Hell or high waters.

If only I had known then just how much Hell was waiting for me underneath those grains of sand…

I was not wise, but I was dedicated—Happy Rat as my witness.


	2. Setting Out

Author's Note: So this story is partially based upon the game, but also upon the real history of Chuck E Cheese's. Most of it is my own imagination though. Enjoy!

Chapter Two: Setting Out

Believe me, it isn't easy assembling a team to go on adventure of this scale. I didn't have a wide selection of contesters. I had to make do with what I had.

Lilith Anders said yes immediately. She had attended college for a year before dropping out due to unspecified mental heath issues. She now worked at McDonalds. She would have followed me to the moon if I told her it was possible. She was short, pudgy, but chipper—especially around me. Back when we are in school together I had sometimes feared that I was leading her on. She understood well now that we would never be a thing, but she was still drawn to me nevertheless.

I needed another guy with us to round things out. My only choice was Jerome, a dark-haired guy who always wore a Russian fur hat. He too had gone to school with Lilith and I. He had been put on academic probation four semesters ago for stabbings his own neck with a pencil during a pop quiz. His excuse was that the professor had not given him enough time before announcing the quiz to de-stress himself. The school had argued that he was becoming a liability that they could not handle. I had personally always found Jerome quite easy to get along with. He was obsessed with all things Communist Russia and with creating his own religion. As long as his mind was on one of these two things, he was happy.

You might be wondering why I would set out with Lilith and Jerome instead of just going alone. Allow me to remind you how scary it is to go an adventure alone. Everyone needs companions, and I still had affinity for these two. They were friends, and friendship knows no boundaries.

As we climbed in the rented van I explained to them again how things would go.

"We send a week driving to New Mexico, then we search for the place where they're buried, then we dig, then we pack as much as we can bring back," I said.

"Yah, we get it Peter," Lilith said. "You told us twelve times already."

"Yah, but just I just want you to know. Can't have you bailing out on me halfway through."

"Not that we'll have a choice in New Mexico."

She sat down on the front passenger's seat. Jerome was already sitting right behind her, spouting off details of his own religion—which has a name so complication I dare not try to spell it out here.

"It's sort of a prologue to Christianity, in the same way that Mormonism is an epilogue to Christianity. My religion features eons and angels and archangels, and it also takes place in different realms."

Lilith and I were thankfully well-trained in tooning him out. We ignored him as usual.

I cranked the minivan up and backed out of my parents driveway. They were convinced that we were on our way to a week-long rock concert downtown. They had been lecturing me all morning about the evils of gangsters and drugs. I had endured it all, knowing that they could not handle the truth.

The GPS guided our way. _Jesus Christ Superstar_ was blasting on the stereo. It would be a long week, but an important one.

If I could do it all over again, I would have brought a loaded rival for each of us, and I would have saved the last bullet for myself.


	3. The GPS

Chapter Three: The GPS

I don't know if you've ever realized this, but to weird people, weird things are completely normal. This can be quite problematic because it can leave you wondering just how normal you are…or aren't. You could doing something completely natural to you, such as digging up female corpses in a cemetery to see which one is the most attractive to you, only to have the hottest one accuse of not only being incredibly sexist, but weird also being weird. You're then left with nothing to do but to try to explain to yourself, all the while the beautiful women are staring at you with their half-decayed faces.

You could be doing something else of course, such as wearing a silly hat in a French café, or singing 70's rock tunes in church, or proposing to someone much younger than you. To you, there is no taboo, but you still have to tell the waitress that snails go down your throat easier this way, and you still have to tell the preacher that this is your method of spirituality, and you still have to tell the district attorney to mind his own damn business. True love knows no bounds.

These aren't my thoughts necessarily. They're just examples.

My point is, when you're driving down to New Mexico with people like Lilith and Jerome, it gives you a lot of time to think things over.

We were finally in the state after a long week. Sometimes we had slept in the minivan, but most of the time we had stayed in cheap hotels. You know, the real shady ones. The ones with body parts on the floor. We didn't have a lot of money, but the local prostitutes who ran the town arranged for us to stay for free. They were nice. They believed in our mission. It's a little known fact that prostitutes respect men with visions. Men like me.

Anyways, a few hours into New Mexico, the worst thing happened. My GPS broke.

Well, that's not entirely accurate.

Jerome broke it. I hate to present him to you in a negative light, but it was really all his fault. Now don't judge him too hard. You have never been half as angry as Jerome was. His face was bright red. His black hairs were all sticking straight up. His beads of sweat were as big as marbles.

I'm still not sure what he was so pissed about, so I'll just type out what he said. I'll just edit out the swear words. I hate swearing.

" _That stupid woman should stop telling us around! Always opening her mouth! She should know her place!"_

The GPA just has a female voice," I said.

" _That's no excuse! She should shut up! Just shut up!"_

"Jerome, chill out," Lilith sighed.

" _No! I won't! She should chill out! She's been bossing Peter around for the past seven days! She should know her place!"_

"And what is a woman's place, just out of curiosity?" I asked.

Jerome had to think about this one for a minute. His eyeballs turned upward. His fists loosened. For a minute I thought he had calmed down. When he came back to us he spoke lowly:

"Women should be aware of men's pockets."

Lilith cocked her head at him. "What?"

Jerome was as cool as a cucumber. "Whenever a man wants to spend time with a woman, he should just pull her out of his pocket. When he tires of her, he should just put her back in. This woman does not know when her time is to go back into the pocket."

"That's incredibly sexist," Lilith said.

"Would it help if I gave it a different voice?" I asked.

In a flash, all of Jerome fury returned to him. "SHUT UP!"

And with that, he shot his fist out as hard as he could.

Now, Jerome was sitting right behind Lilith. The GPS was on the windshield right in front of me. Jerome was nowhere near it. Nevertheless, his knuckles it up, shattering it into a million pieces.

Our only guide was gone, and we were on a narrow road in the middle of the desert.

I would have kicked Jerome out right then and there if I didn't feel somewhat responsible for him.


End file.
